PSPP for Beginners: Bar Graphs

How to make bar graphs

Bar graphs are used to plot the frequency of a categorical variable, with higher bars representing greater quantities. This graph will require having a categorical variable for group membership and a continuously scaled variable representing the dependent variable.

Begin by choosing the barchart option from the graphs drop-down menu.

The graph menu showing command options for scatterplot, histogram, and bar chart.

The continuously scaled variable must go into the "bars represent" field. The categorical variable that will represent the bars goes into the "category axis" field. There are several statistical options to choose from for the bars, with means being the most common analysis.

The dialog box for the bar graph command with Exam1 in the variable field, mean selected, and Sex in the category field.

For this analysis, the bars will represent the means of Exam 1. The categories are from the Sex variable. This graph will have separate bars that represent the Exam1 means for males and females. The output looks like this:

An example of a bar graph based on Exam 1 for males and females.

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